Unlike many IT departments that try to control the technology their workers use, Mr. Merrill’s group lets Google employees download software on their own, choose between several types of computers and operating systems, and use internal software built by the company’s engineers. Lately, he has also spent time evangelizing to outside clients about Google’s own enterprise-software products — such as Google Apps, an enterprise version of Google’s Web-based services including email, word processing and a calendar.

Later:

It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software]. The biggest thing to ask is, “When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?”

Google Apps is hosted on my infrastructure, and [the Premier Edition] costs roughly $50 a seat. You can go from an average of 50 megabytes of [email] storage to 10 gigabytes and more. There’s better response time, you can reach email from anywhere in the world, and it’s more financially effective.

This reminds me of Arizona State University aligning with Google for apps and email: